1. Field of the Invention
Implementations described herein relate generally to information retrieval and, more particularly, to the determination of a desired repository for a search.
2. Description of Related Art
The World Wide Web (“web”) contains a vast amount of information. Locating a desired portion of the information, however, can be challenging. This problem is compounded because the amount of information on the web and the number of new users inexperienced at web searching are growing rapidly.
Search engine systems attempt to return hyperlinks to web pages in which a user is interested. Generally, search engine systems base their determination of the user's interest on search terms (called a search query) entered by the user. The goal of a search engine system is to provide links to high quality, relevant search results (e.g., web pages) to the user based on the search query. Typically, the search engine system accomplishes this by matching the terms in the search query to a corpus of pre-stored web pages. Web pages that contain the user's search terms are “hits” and are returned to the user as links.
Some search engine systems can provide various types of information as the search results. For example, a search engine system might be capable of providing search results relating to web pages, news articles, images, merchant products, usenet pages, yellow page entries, scanned books, and/or other types of information. Typically, a search engine system provides separate interfaces to these different types of information.
When a user provides a search query to a standard search engine system, the user is typically provided with links to web pages. If the user desires another type of information (e.g., images or news articles), the user typically needs to access a separate interface provided by the search engine system.